[Malvern] FW: [ubuntu-uk] Migrating from M$ office

[Ian Pascoe]

Hi Guys

In case anyone would like a play too.

E

-----Original Message-----
From: ubuntu-uk-bounces at lists.ubuntu.com
[mailto:ubuntu-uk-bounces at lists.ubuntu.com]On Behalf Of Rob Beard
Sent: 01 August 2007 11:54
To: ubuntu-uk at lists.ubuntu.com
Subject: [ubuntu-uk] Migrating from M$ office


Hi folks,

On my local LUG someone mentioned about a Plugin for MS Office that  
can import and export ODF files in Microsoft Office.

I've given it a try with Office XP and it's not too bad.  Below are my  
findings from having a quick play, I thought it may be interesting to  
maybe a few people on the Ubuntu list.

Ta,

Rob



Quoting Tom Potts <tompotts at itsosbroadband.co.uk>:

> sun has a plugin that can save MSoffice files in ODF
> format.tp://www.sun.com/software/star/openoffice/
>  down the page a bit
>
> Has anyone tried it - no M$ office here thanks?

Okay I've had a play with it now, it isn't too bad.  I don't any
complicated spreadsheets or Word Documents but what I did try on Word
and Excel did export as ODF format okay.

The Powerpoint conversions were a little more rough around the edges
but any errors appear to be fixable easily enough.

After the plugin is installed it will add a file type to the Open and
Save boxes and also icons on the toolbar saying 'Import ODF' and
'Export ODF'.

The problems I did have with it were....

Downloading it was a pain.  I couldn't get it from the Sun site, the
Java download manager didn't work properly in Windows and I couldn't
manually download it (using either Firefox or IE 6).  I managed to do
a Google search for the executable file
(odp-1.0-bin-windows-en-US.exe) and then download it from another
site.  Also converting some of the files seemed to eat up the system
resources (I'm working on a Dual Core Pentium D 820 running at 2.8GHz
with 1GB Ram) although this may be to do with the fact I have quite a
lot of things open at the moment.

It also doesn't appear to be scriptable, at least I couldn't find any
option for scripting or batch converting files although it may be
possible to write a VBA macro to do this.  It is possible to select
more than one file in the Open box although it comes up with a message
about a possible security risk (it does this with every file that you
import or export).

Still I can certainly see it being of some use and considering it is
written by Sun it is more likely to conform to the ODT standard.

Hope this helps anyway.  What it could do with is some international
mirrors (the installer is a 30MB EXE file) and a bit of publicity.

Rob



----- End forwarded message -----




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